Deborah Rachelle Winter

I was one of the first students to obtain an undergraduate degree in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at University of Toronto. Then, I trained as a computational biologist at Duke University (PhD) under Drs. Greg Crawford and Terry Furey focusing on gene regulation, specifically, using high-throughput sequencing assays to study chromatin dynamics across diverse human cell lines. For my postdoc, I joined Ido Amit's lab in Immunogenomics at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel where I applied genomic approaches to the study of immunology. My landmark paper showed that tissue-resident macrophages are capable of adopting tissue-specific functions by reprogramming their chromatin landscape in response to signal from the local environment.

As a computational immunologist, I interested in mapping the gene regulatory networks of immune cells in health and disease, particularly macrophages in rheumatic disease. As a plastic immune cell type, macrophages are found throughout the body where they play an important role in both homeostatic functions and immune response. The are critical to the pathogenesis of autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis. Using high-throughput sequencing assays and computational techniques, I seek to profile the transcriptional and epigenomic profile of macrophages in different tissues in mouse models and patients with these diseases. We believe that a better understanding of the function and malfunction of macrophages we enable to develop more precise and effective treatments.